For lawyers only

February 12, 2015

There’s one thing he knows for sure: once his legal thriller is published and the royalties are pouring in, his life is going to significantly improve. Wasn’t Turow able to cut way back on his hours? And didn’t Grisham quit the practice altogether? When his legal thriller is published, he won’t be settling for anything less.

He imagines the shock his clients will feel the day he’s finally able to tell them all to go to hell. Yes, things are going to be very good indeed. Didn’t he always say he was destined for greatness? It’s something he’s known since he was eight or nine, when he wrote it on a scrap of paper that has since been preserved by his mother in a frame hanging over her kitchen window: “Someday, I’m going to be really, really famous.”

Yesterday, he indulged himself in a little daydreaming about how his photograph will look on the book’s back cover. Should he smile? Or should he adopt the ponderous, knowing gaze of the serious author? He thinks the latter, unless it means he’ll need to grow a goatee, which his wife ruled out two weeks ago.

A remaining question is how long it’s going to take him to finish the book. He doesn’t like to think about this question, because it always makes him think about another: How should he start it? Frankly, that’s the question that’s really got him stumped. There’s going to be a lawyer character, of course, and the lawyer may as well be sleeping with his secretary. But what happens next? He’s not precisely sure.

It’s a mystery, all right. But it’s nothing that a bottle of whiskey and a couple of writing guides can’t solve. After all, with success just around the corner, how can he go wrong?

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

March 31, 2005

You knew him only as “the senior partner,” so you were honored, but also a little nervous, when you were asked to accompany him to a client’s deposition. You were surprised to have been asked so soon. After all, you’d only been at the firm for three months, and everything you knew about depositions you’d read in books.

You knew the senior partner would be “defending” the deposition—that is, not asking the questions himself, but objecting when the other lawyer asked his questions. From reading books, you knew that before depositions, lawyers are supposed to “woodshed” their clients by telling them what and what not to say. The very good lawyers never did this explicitly, of course, both to avoid problems of ethics and of poor form. Instead, the good lawyers cloaked their woodshedding in a haze of ambiguity.

When you showed up for the pre-deposition meeting a little early, it was the woodshedding that you were thinking about. While waiting for the senior partner to arrive, you engaged in some uncomfortable small talk with the client about baseball and TV.

Finally, the senior partner arrived. The woodshedding was not exactly what you’d expected. It took precisely five seconds and went something like this: “Sorry I’m late. You’re going to do fine. Let’s go.”

Three years of legal education, and it’s clear that you don’t know the first thing about practicing law! You make a quick note about proper pre-meeting technique and sit down at the deposition in a corner of the room, where you wait for the senior partner to display the qualities that made him great.

And that’s when you get a big surprise. As the deposition begins, you see the senior partner pull something out of his briefcase—not documents you recognize from the case, not pleadings or discovery answers but . . . a stack of bills! After that, the senior partner produces a checkbook and begins . . . paying his bills!

What about the lawyering? What about the objecting? The senior partner doesn’t make any objections. In fact, he looks up from his bills only once, to tell the deponent—your firm’s client—to “answer the counsel’s question. Please.”

It’s quite a shock. Quite a shock indeed.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

March 23, 2005

“It will make your life easier,” says the lawyer with the shiny new gadget. “Trust me on this one. Once you get one of your own, you won’t know how you ever lived without it.”

The lawyer with the shiny new gadget starts to hand it to you, but then changes his mind. You have to look at the gadget from across his desk.

There’s no doubt it looks intriguing. And the lawyer with the shiny new gadget knows that you're intrigued. He takes the opportunity to tell you more about it. It’s unobtrusive, he says, and barely noticeable. It’s as quiet as the very best legal secretaries. It can be set to lie on a flat surface or made to hover in the air. It’s so tiny it would fit into your mouth.

“And it would probably even taste good!” says the lawyer with the shiny new gadget. “Did I tell you what happens if you use it in the dark?”

“No,” you reply. “I don’t think you did.”

“It lights up automatically!”

“Do you ever use it in the dark?” you ask the lawyer with the shiny new gadget.

“Definitely,” he replies. “Most definitely. All the time. I plan to, anyway.”

For a moment, both of you are silent. But suddenly, the lawyer with the shiny new gadget grins at you and presses a button. He’s put his shiny new gadget into hover mode! Like magic, it lifts into the air. It hovers around the desk. You’re mesmerized by its tiny blinking lights and its quiet whirring sound.

It makes you think about your life and how complicated it is. Wouldn't it be wonderful if things could be simple again? But how? As it happens, the lawyer with the shiny new gadget has already answered the question: by buying a shiny new gadget of your very own!

Yes, that’s the answer. How long will it take? Not very long. If the shiny new gadget’s not on back order at the electronics store, it might happen this very afternoon.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

February 24, 2005

To the unobservant eye, he was nothing much, a poor dresser with poor posture, fond of shuffling his feet and sucking on his lower lip, attached to a sort of glasses last popular in the 1950s. His shoes hadn’t been shined since a previous Christmas. All his ties were stained. He laughed out loud at inappropriate moments, even though no one had said anything funny.

In the beginning, the partners were ready to write him off. They figured he was a lightweight, a pushover, a disposable worker bee who’d put in a few good years of document review and then be discarded like so many of the others. But they didn’t understand. They didn’t realize that this unassuming rube was the associate-who-would-learn-where-the-bodies-were-buried, and that one day he’d be running the firm.

While the other associates were busy memorizing procedural rules, he spent his time making a study of the men and women who ran the firm. This didn’t require a paradigm shift so much as a simple knowledge of history: the firm was a castle, and he was a courtier. In making his reputation at the firm, he had never planned to trade in the usual currency—that is, a superior knowledge of the law or an enviable book of business—but something much more valuable, the secrets of the partner-kings.

Eavesdropping at a firm party one night, he learned of a plan by the opportunistic Jones to take the Mitsubishi business away from an unsuspecting Smith; he had only to report the planned coup to Smith himself in order to become Smith’s prized associate. From this position, he reported back to Jones, who never suspected that such a frumpy-looking associate might have been the one who’d derailed his coup. Jones was very interested in what Smith was up to.

As a double agent, the associate-who-was-learning-where-the-bodies-were- buried next became a triple agent, reporting to still higher levels in the law-firm hierarchy on the goings-on of both Jones and Smith. Soon he became a trusted—and secret—advisor to the head of the firm’s management committee.

It was only then that the partners began to suspect what was going on. Though the feeling was unanimous that the associate-who-knew-where- the-bodies-were-buried had to go, no one dared to make a move. Instead, they made him a partner, and fell all over themselves trying to be his friend. He acquiesced readily, slapping them all on the back in his new suit and freshly-polished shoes, his posture now perfect, just like his eyesight—in fact, there’d never been anything wrong with his eyes. Those glasses had merely been a prop.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

January 25, 2005

The first thing you need to understand about the-lawyer-who’s-on-The-Apprentice is that he’s not a lawyer at all. Just watch the show, and you’ll see proof of this about every ten minutes on the graphic that’s added to the screen just below his name.

There it is now. Do you see it? See, he’s not a lawyer. He’s an “attorney.”

Never mind that an "attorney" is nothing more than a lawyer who wants to sound more important than he really is. But perhaps the blame for this little exaggeration should be placed on the producers of the show. If you met the lawyer-who's-on-The-Apprentice for a beer and there weren’t any cameras around, perhaps he'd be a hundred times more modest than he’s been made to look on the show.

But wait! There he is now in the boardroom, arguing with Mr. Trump about what sets him apart from the other contestants. “I’m an attorney!” he’s screaming immodestly. “And all the others—they don’t even know what an attorney does!”

He’s got a point. On the other hand, does the attorney-who’s-on-The-Apprentice know what an attorney does?

Let’s keep our cynicism in check. Of course he knows. An attorney is someone who spends a fortune on law school, figures out he’s made a horrendous mistake, isn’t happy at all, and comes up with an action plan to get himself out of the mess he’s made of his life, to wit: (1) get on The Apprentice or, failing that, (2) get on Jeopardy.

But that’s not all! Attorneys do even more than this. An attorney is also someone who lives in close quarters with other young people, all of them fresh-faced, enthusiastic, and unable to answer the telephone while wearing a shirt (or, if female, in anything but revealing pajamas), and then spends the rest of his day conniving, bragging, scheming, back-stabbing, lying, and “forming alliances”--but never, ever, except if required by the producers of the show during the morning-phone-answering shot, removing his clothing in public.

Now that’s an attorney. And if everything goes well and he doesn’t get fired by Mr. Trump, an attorney is something even more than this: he’s a guy (or gal) who will win the Grand Prize, that is, a chance to work as an employee for a debt-laden real-estate company.

December 20, 2004

You’ve known him all your life. He’s boorish, self-centered, and arrogant. He’s petty and vain. And greedy. And what a loudmouth! Always gesturing with those long fingers--which are very smooth, by the way. He’s the only man you know with a French manicure.

This weekend, you’re supposed to see him at a party. You wish you didn’t have to. You already know what he’s going to be talking about: his new BMW, or his gold watch, or his jet lease. Or maybe his plans for an upcoming winter vacation, when he’ll be taking the entire family, including an ex-wife, skiing in Vancouver. It’s certainly a discussion you could do without!

That’s why you plan to keep your distance. It’ll be easy to do, too, since you’ll recognize him the moment he enters the room. You’ve seen him on TV, after all. And you’ve read about him in the newspapers, and in magazines, and in the fiction of John Grisham.

But will he even show up at the party? Now that you think about it, every time you expect to see the Stereotypical Lawyer, he’s nowhere to be found. It’s a mystery to which you have no answer. It’s like . . . it’s like he doesn’t exist at all! But how could that be possible?

You’re not sure. You’re stumped. But this doesn’t surprise you much: after all, you always have been sort of an addle-headed moron.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

October 25, 2004

The lawyer from the planet Og arrived on Earth last month from a galaxy far, far away. His mission: to conduct research for Chapter 45 of Volume 768 of the popular Ogian reference work, The Very Large Guide to Lawyers of the Universe. The chapter's title: "American Lawyers."

The lawyer from the planet Og is very far from home, and his assignment was an unpopular one. He’s not sure why he drew the short ogstraw, but it was probably as retribution for the way he suffocated the entire lawyer population of Andromeda 765. It was a group of lawyers that would have annoyed any sentient being.

Although the American lawyers might not be much better, the lawyer from the planet Og finds them at least minimally intriguing. He has so many questions. For example, why are American lawyers so numerous? On the planet Og, there’s only one lawyer for every billion Ogians. While it’s true that Ogian lawyers have thirty individual brains, all capable of reasoning in separate parallel networks, the American ratio still seems completely out of whack. Could it be that American lawyers have only half a brain?

And why are American lawyers so angry and high-strung? Is it because they think about their day-to-day business using all the wrong metaphors? The lawyer from the planet Og has heard how American lawyers conduct scorched-earth discovery to prepare for trial, use battle-tested litigation tactics to persuade juries, and tell each other war stories about how their cases end.

Is it the stress of their jobs that makes them all so angry? Then why don’t they adopt new metaphors to think about the way they practice? Are American lawyers so much creatures of their own past that they are unable to imagine a different future?

These questions are interesting, but they pose another problem. Although there’s so much to learn, the research must be completed in only 1,589 Og rotations. Yesterday, the lawyer from the planet Og made an important discovery: though their fellow citizens always turn to them in times of crisis, American lawyers are very unpopular. In some circles, in fact, they are even hated and despised.

It’s this discovery that has given hope to the lawyer from the planet Og. That's because the most efficient way to study the American lawyers would be to transport them all to his home planet. And now he knows it’s feasible: when the one million American lawyers are abducted for research purposes, it's clear they won’t be missed. Even, that is, if they’re never able to return . . .

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

October 05, 2004

At night, you might hear him crying out from the darkness of his prison cell. “Listen to me!” he screams. “Listen!” His voice is distant, his message muddled. Only towards dawn do you begin to hear him clearly. “I need help!” you hear him scream. “I’m dying in here!”

As the sun rises, you gaze upon the lonely prisoner. He looks familiar. At first, you don’t understand the irony. Then you look more closely. With a shock, you realize that the prisoner looks identical to the architect who built the prison—the same pale complexion, the same receding hairline, the same overweight build. Could it be? Yes, it is.

You want to look away. For it was this very man—this same lonely, besieged prisoner—who both supervised the prison’s construction and then allowed its walls to close in around himself. How can you pity such a blundering fool? How can you pity a man who possesses the keys to his own freedom but lacks the imagination to figure out how to work the lock?

You can’t. It's time to go. Leaving the prison, you emerge into the sunshine of your own far-from-perfect life, where you make the best of things from day to day even though you are grateful for the weekends.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]

August 09, 2004

Don’t use the credit card, he tells himself. It’s a refrain he's been repeating over and over like a song stuck in his head, a mantra that makes him turn inward despite the brilliant sunshine reflecting off the hood of his car, the beauty of the wildflowers in full bloom along the highway.

Don’t use the credit card, he tells himself again. They’ll find you if you do. Why are you even carrying the credit card? Sure, you can use it for cash advances, but it’s stupid. Stupid! They’re on your trail. One more cash advance and you’re a goner.

To be honest, the cash advances aren’t the half of it. There was another mistake, even more profound: he’s driving a stolen car. He didn’t want it that way. But this is real life, goddamn it, not some kid’s video game, and he has to stay alive. So he stole a car. Sure, it wasn’t the best choice, but it was the only one he could find with the keys in the ignition: a bright purple VW Beetle. It was just another fuck-up in a long string of fuck-ups. At least he threw those goddamn daisies out the window.

And if he keeps ahead of his pursuers, maybe—maybe—he won’t die.

He wonders how long he has. A week? Two weeks? Off to his left, he catches the first sight of the Rocky Mountains far in the distance. It’s progress, but he’s still a beaten man. The irony, that it’s all happened to him, a lawyer who belongs to not just one, but two, country clubs. And who has a summer place on the Carolina coast! And a houseboat! And a wine collection!

July 28, 2004

Shhh! The partner-who-golfs is teeing off, and he never likes it when you chuckle during his backswing. So you don't. Instead, you stand quietly as he adjusts his unorthodox stance, takes two painful-looking practice swings, and then gives it all he’s got with his new Titleist Titanium 983K driver.

Oh, too bad. The partner-who-golfs didn’t quite make it across the lake. As he reaches into his bag for another sleeve of Top Flites, you bite your lip. You’d like to laugh, but if you do, the partner-who-golfs is going to find a different associate to be his golfing buddy. And which would you rather do, bill eighteen hours for the partner-who-golfs, or accompany him for eighteen holes? The question implies an answer. It’s why you’re willing to help him with his club selection, correct his estimates of the distance to the pin, and give him seven more mulligans than he bargained for at the beginning of the round.

“Great shot!” you tell him on the next hole. “Those lessons are really paying off!” See how he smiles when you compliment his swing? Sure you’re sucking up, but who can blame you for making an old, balding lawyer feel as sprightly as Tiger Woods or as determined as Todd Hamilton?

So when the partner-who-golfs bends down to improve his lie, you look the other way. When he taps in a two-footer for a double bogie, you applaud. Are you being dishonest? Perhaps, but you’re also helping your career. And if you happen to get another golfing invitation in the process, so be it. You made your decision as you rounded the turn: the partner-who-golfs is the partner for you.

[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]